A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities and people with similar or somewhat similar interests, backgrounds and/or activities make their own communities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user (often a profile), his/her social links, and a variety of additional services. Most social network services are web-based and provide means for users to interact over the Internet, such as e-mail, and instant messaging. Examples of social networking services include, but are not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.
Some social networking sites allow users to share ideas, activities, events, and interests within their individual networks or with the public. This information is commonly shared through public and/or private social feeds. Twitter is a social networking service in which users can create short messages or mircoblogs (also called “tweets”) related to a wide variety of subjects. Twitter has seen rapid growth since it launched in 2006 and now commands more than 140 million users that generate more than 340 million messages per day. Twitter users can tweet about any topic within a 140-character limit. Like other social networking services, Twitter users can follow others to receive their tweets—which combined form the user's social feed.
An important characteristic of Twitter is its real-time nature. For instance, when a major event occurs, people generate and send tweets that are related to the event over a wide area network such as, for example, the Internet. Transmission of the tweets over the network enables a near immediate detection of the event by observing the tweets over the network. This detection of trending topics enables one to quickly discern what is currently happening in the world. The current happenings or popular events and/or subjects are sometimes referred to as trending topics. Unfortunately, determining the appropriate representation of these trending topics—which has a significant impact on the interpretation of the topics—can be exceedingly difficult.